History in Schools: What is the Future?

On Monday, the Historical Association sponsored an event at the Institute of Education in London called History in Schools: What is the Future? Chaired cleverly by Professor David Cannadine, it was a public debate on the future of the history curriculum and was well attended, with most of those present being secondary school teachers of history. The panel, which included the educationist Katharine Burn, headteacher Steve Mastin and the former Education Secretary Lord Baker, were articulate and consensual, as were many of the teachers.

But two things unsettled me. Firstly, the fact, as it emerged, that less than 30 per cent of schoolchildren take history at GCSE. Apparently, it is seen as a difficult, academic subject, a stigma it shares with the separate sciences and modern languages (i.e. the very subjects that make one educated).

My second concern was the frequency with which both panel and delegates used the word ‘relevant’. One delegate expressed some anger that children in Newcastle were being taught about the Great Fire of London; apparently it had ‘nothing to do with them’. Presumably, according to the logic of this teacher, people from the North-East of England are only interested in coal mining, football and necking down brown ale. God forbid their range of interests should be widened.

Even more worryingly, one of the panelists, Chris Husbands, Professor of Education at the IOE, expressed surprise that ‘kids in Tottenham’, a benighted inner city area of London, were being taught about life in a medieval monastery. Why? I wonder what the distinguished Princeton Professor William Chester Jordan, a world authority on medieval monasticism who just happens to be black, would make of such pigeonholing?

Tory-Liberal Parallels with the Fox-North Coalition

There is a rather strange and embittered article in the Guardian today by Andrew Adonis, the former transport minister. He draws parallels between the new ‘Liberal Conservative’ administration and the Fox-North coalition which held power between April and December 1783.

The Tory Lord North, who famously lost America, formed an administration with the radical Whig Charles James Fox, after defeating the government of Lord Shelburne. It was an unlikely pairing and was bitterly opposed by George III who, among other things, was appalled by the influence of the libertine Fox on his son and heir, George Augustus Frederick. Though Fox and North were the prime movers, the prime minister was actually William Henry Cavendish-Bentinck, Third Duke of Portland. Undermined by its own contradictions and lack of support, it collapsed before the year was out, making way for two decades of political dominance by William Pitt the Younger.

Though there are undoubtedly major hurdles ahead for Britain’s new administration, especially over policy, parallels with the North-Fox coalition do seem rather forced. The likes of Nick Clegg and David Laws, for example, do not seem hugely different in their economic and social outlook to the likes of David Cameron and George Osborne (Clegg is on record as saying that social democracy is dead). None are tainted by failure as yet (unlike North), nor does anyone resemble the colourful loose cannon that was Fox. They are not propping up a lame-duck PM, like the Duke of Portland. And The Queen seems happy enough with the arrangement. So it seems odd that the normally generous Adonis, the arch pragmatist, intelligent student of history and a former active member of the Liberal Democrats’ forerunner, the SDP, should see such similarities.

But there are resonances he has missed. The Duke of Portland was of Dutch extraction and educated at Westminster, like Clegg; and both North and Fox were schooled at Eton College. The grip of such schools on the body politic remains almost as great at the beginning of the 21st century as at the end of the 18th. Until very hard questions are asked about the nation’s education system and acted upon, it will remain so.

A Silver Lining Amongst the Gloom

Gloom has descended upon university history departments throughout Britain. Cambridge’s history faculty has followed that of Oxford in freezing all new appointments, perhaps for years to come. One senior historian has described the position outside Oxbridge as ‘near catastrophic’. Much publicity has been given to the University of Sussex’s decision to drop research and research-led teaching in early modern history in what appears to be yet another step towards the dominance of modern history at the expense of earlier periods. King’s College London is to lose its chair in palaeography, an obscure discipline certainly, but one crucial to the production of scholarly editions of, for example, Anglo- Saxon literature. Mark Goldie, reader in British intellectual history at Cambridge, is surely right when he says that a ‘decent history syllabus cannot be so present-centred’.

Yet there may be some benefits to all of this in the long run, a concentration of minds. Clearly, given current economic conditions and the loss of £950 million from higher education budgets over the next three years, historians and their departments, like other academics, will be compelled to go in search of private endowments, as has been common in the United States for decades (with remarkable success) and to forge closer links with the public (something too many historians are still reluctant to do).

Commentators such as Simon Jenkins have even suggested that some universities should seize the opportunity to privatise and charge the market rate for their courses, enabling them to provide scholarships to those unable to afford the full fees. But would government be willing to cede control of educational institutions?

The options for university departments will become more apparent when Lord Browne of Madingley’s report on the funding of higher education is published later this year. Whatever the conclusions reached, it will be wise to recall the words of the Oxford historian and President of the Board of Education H.A.L. Fisher, written in 1919, but still relevant to the teaching of history, not least because they are so utterly at odds with the current mania for ‘relevance’ and ‘utility’:

‘The business of a university is not to equip students for professional posts, but to train them in disinterested intellectual habits, to give them a vision of what real learning is, to refine taste, to form judgement, to enlarge curiosity and to substitute for a low and material outlook on life a lofty view of its resources and demands.’

Sean Lang on History Teaching

There is an excellent letter by Sean Lang on the controversy surrounding the teaching of history published in today’s Independent. Sean, senior lecturer in history at Anglia Ruskin University, honorary secretary of the Historical Association and a passionate advocate for the discipline, knows of what he speaks. His letter is a firm corrective to some of the ignorant assertions made by some members of the commentariat.

History in Britain's Schools

The debate on the teaching of History in Britain’s schools continues with the modern historian Dominic Sandbrook writing in today’s Daily Telegraph. The bestselling author of White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (Abacus) puts much of the blame on ‘progressive educationists’ who ‘did away with old-fashioned essay questions and replaced them with empathy exercises and multiple-choice quizzes that sacrificed any sense of intellectual depth or discipline’. He also points out that it was the last Conservative government who downgraded history from a compulsory to an optional subject at the age of 16; neither major party emerges with much credit on this matter.

Sandbrook concludes that the study of History,

‘ought to be the centrepiece of the education system, a long and thoughtful expedition, not a botched and half-hearted day-trip to which most children are no longer invited. And one day, I suspect, we will look back and judge that our Government’s ignorance and neglect of that wonderful, dazzling, irresistible country was among the greatest of its failures and the most unforgivable of its many betrayals.’

Who could disagree?

One further point. Following on from Tristram Hunt and Ann Whitelock’s endorsement of H.E. Marshall’s Our Island Story in our current edition (Terry Deary: History Made Horrible?, September 2009), Sandbrook makes the claim that this children’s history of England, published in 1905 (!), ‘still gives a more entertaining overall account of our national story than most modern textbooks’. Surely it is not beyond a publisher to create a modern version of this potentially huge bestseller. I'm off to talk with my agent.

A Tragedy of History Teaching

There have been a number of reports, most recently in yesterday’s Observer, noting a remarkable resurgence of interest in the past. This is reflected, for example, in the shortlist for the Booker Prize. All the novels nominated are examples of historical fiction (the subject of our Signposts column in the forthcoming October History Today). Yet this growing interest in Britain’s past comes at a time when only 30 per cent of pupils take History at GCSE level and, as a Historical Association (HA) survey confirms, in the curriculum of some schools History is disappearing as a discrete. This is not because History is an unpopular subject. As the report states: ‘Those schools that allocate more than an hour a week to history for 13-14 years olds, or which are increasing the time they allocate to history, are significantly more likely to see an increase rather than a decrease in GCSE uptake’.

Perhaps the most disturbing finding of the HA’s report is that while ‘over 90 per cent of independent and grammar schools represented teach history as an entirely separate subject . . . only 72.3 per cent of the comprehensives and 59.1 of the academies that responded do so. ’

It is unacceptable, say the report’s authors, to preserve the study of History ‘only for the high attainers’ for the discipline ‘encourages mutual understanding of the historic origins of our ethnic and cultural diversity, and helps pupils become confident and questioning individuals’. The study of History, the report continues, ‘prepares pupils for the future, equipping them with knowledge and skills that are prized in adult life, enhancing employability and developing an ability to take part in democratic society.’

It may also be worth pointing out amid these utilitarian enconiums that History is worth studying simply because, as Chris Wickham, Chichele Professor of Medieval History at Oxford University, wrote in History Today, ‘it is simply very interesting’.

As for why this has happened, the report points to the Government’s obsession with league tables:

‘Students have been deliberately denied an opportunity to study history by forcing them down vocational or academic pathways. GCSE students have also been taken off courses against their wishes to do BTEC (Business and Technology Education Council) qualifications in six months so that the school can boost its position in the league tables. This has happened to students who were otherwise on target for a C/B in History but who were doing badly on their other subject.

Given the choice, it seems that pupils across a wide range of abilities have a passion for History. It is a tragedy that so many are denied access to an understanding of the past.

Don't Tell Oslo!

There is an excellent piece by Simon Jenkins in the Guardian today, inspired by the opening of the British Museum’s new medieval gallery. In it, Jenkins, winner earlier this year of our Trustees’ Award, tackles the scandal of our museum’s hidden treasures, locked away in basements and storerooms, as well as the complexities of loaning items out to museums in countries that have a claim on a particular item; most famously, the Elgin Marbles. Following in the footsteps of Melina Mercouri, Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond is seeking the return of the Lewis Chessmen, inspiration of Noggin the Nog and centrepiece of the new gallery. Jenkins points out that they are in fact Norwegian. Don’t tell Oslo or they might stop sending us the Christmas tree.

Jenkins, nuanced, original and provocative, is plainly the product of a very good education. In his case, Mill Hill School and St John’s College, Oxford. His erudition has been placed in the service of the public, through his books, columns, and now as chairman of the National Trust, with its 3 miilion plus members. Ed Balls also received an outstanding education – Nottingham High School, Keble College, Oxford and a Kennedy scholarship at Harvard – but one wishes his mother and father (who once taught at Eton) had saved their money. The Education Minister, sorry, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, seems determined to reduce our children to blithering idiots with attention spans of goldfish. That is unless their parents can afford private education, tutors to get their children into one of the few remaining grammar schools or, often the most expensive option of all, buy a house in the catchment area of a comprehensive school that works. He appears to think that our children are more in need of lessons in technological fads, of which Twitter is the latest and soon to be outmoded by necessity, than in history (or science, maths, English, foreign languages etc). In the immortal words of another clown, Eric Morecambe, the man’s a fool. I personally couldn’t care less whether our children study Churchill or not. I would prefer them to tackle classical or medieval history, or the history of south-east Asia. But without a knowledge of history, one becomes a very passive citizen. Perhaps that is the plan. It is not one we can afford.